The "Freedom of Reason" and the Joy of Foregoing AI

A letter to my students.

Dear Students,

As you’re beginning to work on your first research papers, I want to take a moment to talk to you about the use of AI in your writing process.

I’m not here to scold. My point isn’t finger-wagging and policing. You can find the statement on academic ethics & integrity in the syllabus. I don’t need to restate expectations for you. I have come to realize that, with new technology, I might not even be able to detect violations. (This makes me feel both old and sad.) If students choose to violate the rules, it’s not because they don’t know them.

The temptation is to let machines do your work for you. Entire industries are devoted to making this so incredibly easy that it would almost seem irrational not to utilize the resources at your disposal. Instead of scolding or scaring you, I want to appeal to you to consider how outsourcing your own reflection, thinking, and writing to AI is really a way of missing out on a distinct sort of joy.

One of the philosophical themes we’ve encountered in both Pascal and Kant is the distinct power and majesty of our capacity for thinking. You remember, for example, Pascal’s curious metaphor of the “thinking reed”: that we human beings are those marvelous, vulnerable creatures who share mortality with the rest of creation; but we are the ones who are aware of this. As distinctly conscious beings with the power of reason, we face these realities reflectively. Even our existential crises reflect our “greatness,” as Pascal puts it. We’re not just thermometers who merely react to external stimuli; we are thermostats who both absorb reality and affect it: we can change things. We can make a dent on the world. We can create.

But I’m also thinking of a theme we discovered in Kant in our last class session when we discussed his essay, “Perpetual Peace.” Do you remember when he distinguished between “the freedom of folly” and the “freedom of reason?” The “freedom of folly” feels like freedom because it is just lawless devotion to instinct. It might seem like you’re “free” to do whatever you want, but in the process, you end up bound to your wants. And before you know it, you are subject to your wants and whims; you have no power to resist; you’re enslaved to your passions; you’re an addict.

In contrast, Kant says, the “freedom of reason” is a very unique achievement: humans are those creatures that, by means of reflection and reason, can realize it is good for us to choose to bind ourselves by certain constraints and laws. We can effectively give ourselves a law; or, as Kant puts it, we can freely choose to impose upon ourselves some constraint in order to achieve some other goods that we value. A more ancient way way of articulating this says it can be rational to submit ourselves to a “discipline” (askesis) that we (rationally) recognize as a constraint, but we also recognize that is for our good.¹

There is something mysterious here until you experience it: the distinct sense of freedom, even power, that comes from taking responsibility. Freedom is cultivating the distinctively human powers of rationality to triumph over mere instinct and the default habits of culture. Instinct is the path of least resistance; reason is the path of reflection, resistance, and responsibility. The path of reason is, perhaps paradoxically, both more arduous and liberating.

How does this relate to writing your papers and resisting the temptation to let AI “do it for you?” Microsoft and Google and other outposts of the Distraction Industrial Complex want to make you into people who default to the path of least resistance. Your generation has been raised in a world and an environment where machines and technology are always within reach, all promising to make things easier. The question is: will doing this make you more human, or less? If it is precisely our capacity for reflection and reason—if our “glory” is our power to think—then doesn’t outsourcing thinking actually diminish our humanity?

I don’t want to use a stick to discourage you from using AI in your work; I want to hold up a carrot, so to speak. I want you to see resistance to the “easier” path of AI as an expression of your own “freedom of reason.” I want you to experience the arduous work of reading carefully, taking notes, undertaking analysis, and crafting sentences as a discipline (askesis) that you choose to give yourself so that you can realize new facets of your distinctive humanity. I want you to experience the liberating power of being able to think for yourself and not making yourself further subservient to machines and your environment. I even want to convince you that failing at this endeavor is more glorious than the B+ you’ll get using AI.

Beside my desk here at home, where I have photos of my family and from some of my research travels, alongside postcards of paintings that are precious to me and poems I want to remember, I have pasted a quote from a novel called Zero K by Don DeLillo. It’s a kind of sci-fi, futurist story about people who are trying to technologically achieve immortality. I love the novel for a lot of reasons I won’t get into, but there’s a passage that I’ve written out and kept nearby. It goes like this:

Haven’t you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy?

I want us to feel uneasy offloading our “greatness” (Pascal) to machines. I want us to be unsettled by trading our distinct freedom of reason (Kant) for what seems like the “easier” path.

But more than that: I want you to experience the distinct sort of joy that comes from using your freedom to think. I want you to experience the unparalleled thrill of being puzzled, thinking something through, and then “getting it.” The light going on. The epiphany that dawns. I want you to experience the unique joy that comes from creativity.

This morning one of my favorite writers, Margaret Renkl, penned a lovely op-ed about all this: “A Word Against Writing with Robots.” (I read this in good ol’ analog newsprint; now when I look up the link, I see the essay online is entitled, simply, “I, Human.”) I won’t rehearse her whole argument here; I encourage you to read the essay. But I want to close with how she opens.

Renkl recalls working on her master’s thesis, decades ago. It was a poetry collection, and she was wrangling with her advisor, James Dickey, over a single word—an adjective that just didn’t sit right for either of them. The conversation proved unfruitful; no solution. But hours later, late at night, the perfect word burbled up from the depths of her imagination.

“It was so apt, and I was so exultant, that I went straight to the kitchen, opened the phone book, and looked up Mr. Dickey’s number. When he answered, I said, “‘Pale.’ The word is ‘pale.’”

This is a very analog moment! The phone tethered to the kitchen wall; a phone book listing everyone’s phone number; the whirring of the strange dial to place a call. But what is perennial is the sense of exultation at discovery and creation. The joy of “getting it.” Renkl tells us that the elder Mr. Dickey wasn’t angered by the late night call; he “was overjoyed about that word, every bit as jubilant as I was. If only for a moment, the world made a kind of sense it hadn’t made before.”

I want you to experience that joy—or at least give yourself the opportunity and availability to experience the distinct joy of thinking. Utilizing AI, outsourcing your thinking and creativity to machines, will rob you of that opportunity. Choose askesis. Exercise your power to reason by giving yourself the constraint to do this work on your own. There are goods much more important than grades at stake here.

1. In some ways, this is what adulthood is supposed to be.